"Miss Christian!" a raven-croak came through a slit of the pantry-door; "keep off the Carmodys' land! Mind now what I'm tellin' you!" The slit ceased.
"Thank you for the cocoa, Evans, but why must I?" called Christian, in a breath.
A lower croak, that seemed to end with the words "black papishes," came through the closed door.
"Old lunatic!" thought Christian; she drank the cocoa, and putting out the lamp, groped her way to the back-door. It opened on a shrieking hinge, and she was out into a pale grey dawn, pure and cold, with the shiver and freshness of new life in it.
The Mount Music stable yard was an immense square, with buildings round its four sides, and a high, ivy-covered battlemented wall surrounding and overlooking all. In the middle of the yard was an island of grass, on which grew three wide-armed and sombre Irish yews, dating, like the walls, from the days of Queen Elizabeth. Weeds were growing in the gravel of the wide expanse; more than one stable-door dropped on broken hinges under its old cut-stone pediments; the dejection of a faded and remembered prosperity lay heavy on all things in the thin, cold air of that September dawn.
The clatter of a horse's hoofs came cheerfully from a stable, and, as Christian crossed the yard, a dishevelled young man, with a large red moustache, put his head over the half-door.
"I'm this half-hour striving to girth her, Miss," he complained, "she got very big entirely on the grass; the surcingle's six inches too short for her, let alone the way she have herself shwoll up agin me!"
Charles, once ruler and lawgiver, was dead, and, with the departure of the hounds, Major Dick's interest in the stables had died too; his tall, grey horse was ending his days in bondage to the outside car; the meanest of the underlings who had grovelled beneath Charles' top-boots, was now in sole charge, and had grown a moustache, unchecked; and Christian's only mount was a green four-year-old filly, in whom she had invested the economies of a life-time, with but a dubious chance of their recovery.
"Can't you get a bit of string and tie up the surcingle Tommy?" suggested Christian, who was now too well used to these crises in the affairs of the stable to be much moved by them.
"Sure, I'm after doing it, Miss. T'would make a cat laugh the ways I have on it! She's a holy fright altogether with the mane and the tail she have on her! I tried to pull them last night, and she went up as straight as a ribbon in the stable!"